What’s 3,500
feet wide, 6,055 miles long and 2.9 million acres big? That’s
wider than Hoover Dam, bigger than Yellowstone National Park and
almost three times as long as the Mississippi River. This behemoth
goes by the name of the West-Wide Energy Corridor, and if you live
in the West it could soon devour a landscape near you.
This huge new system of energy corridors was mandated by the Energy
Policy Act of 2005. You remember 2005: That was when newly
re-elected President Bush claimed a “mandate” and
Congress was controlled by Republicans. The Energy Policy Act was a
grab bag of tax breaks and incentives to various sectors of the
energy industry that failed to raise vehicle mileage standards or
take any other meaningful steps to reduce energy demand. Section
368 of the law directed the Secretaries of the departments of
Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy and Interior to designate
corridors on federal land in 11 Western states for oil, gas and
hydrogen pipelines and electrical power lines. These agencies have
now released the federal West-wide Energy Corridor Programmatic
Environmental Impact Statement, a three-volume document totaling
well over 1,000 pages.
If its bureaucratic verbiage numbs
the brain, its system maps should make anyone sit up and take
notice. Check them out at
http://corridoreis.anl.gov//eis/dmap/index.cfm They show a network
of cracks spreading across the West, from Puget Sound to El Paso,
and from San Diego to the Little Bighorn. On these maps, our
beloved West looks like a shattered and poorly mended dinner plate.
And that is an entirely accurate image.
These new energy
corridors — averaging two-thirds of a mile wide — will fracture a
landscape that is already a maze of hairline cracks — the lines
made by highways, railroads and the current, comparatively delicate
energy rights-of-way. These existing corridors have been enough to
severely fragment habitat in the West, interfering with the
movements of pronghorn, elk and bison, denying undisturbed wild
areas to wolves and grizzly bears, and weakening the ecological
health of deserts, grasslands and forests.
The West-Wide
Energy Corridor, if enacted, would be a death sentence for many
wildlife populations. The corridors it outllnes would cross
national wildlife refuges, national recreation areas, national
monuments and national parks. One tentacle would split the Big Horn
Basin of Wyoming; another would run the length of
California’s Owens Valley between Sequoia and Death Valley
national parks; another would cut from Mesa Verde National Park in
Colorado to Bandelier National Monument near Santa Fe.
You have to wonder why the government didn’t simply use the
existing system of energy corridors and rights of way. And here is
the government’s answer: ”This option was considered
but eliminated for a number of reasons. Many of the existing energy
corridors and utility rights-of-way … are sized for
relatively small transport systems (both in terms of capacity and
distance) and could neither support added systems nor be expanded
to accommodate additional energy transport facilities. These
limitations make them too fragmentary or localized to serve the
need for long-distance energy transport across the West.”
Well, many readers may think, fair enough. We do have to
upgrade our energy delivery systems, don’t we? Isn’t
this an example of the government being prudent and planning for
the future?
Arising out of the political context of 2005,
the Energy Policy Act did not entertain the possibility that energy
use could actually be reduced through conservation, and it gave
little consideration to local power generation by wind farms or
solar arrays, for example, that would not require massive,
long-distance energy corridors. In other words, the West-Wide
Energy Corridor was never a prudent attempt to plan for the future:
it simply takes a failed energy distribution model and makes it
bigger.
Then there’s the contentious issue of
property rights. On the maps, the lines representing the corridors
are frequently interrupted, only to pick up again after a gap.
Those gaps are private land; the map shows only the rights of way
proposed for federal land. Obviously, those gaps must be filled in,
and if you happen to be a landowner in the way, watch out!
The West-Wide Energy Corridor analysis is open for public
comment until Feb. 14, and so far, what appears to be a land grab
has received little media attention. If you value the integrity of
our public lands and the sanctity of private property, you owe it
to yourself to take a look at
http://corridoreis.anl.gov/eis/dmap/index.cfm
To me, it
looks like an octopus trying to devour the West.
Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a biologist and
writer in Ashland, Oregon.
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